


autour de ton cou

by spacestationtrustfund



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:45:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/pseuds/spacestationtrustfund
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his dreams it’s he who lets go instead of Bucky, and it’s a better world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	autour de ton cou

He knows the old myth surrounding the soldiers’ dog tags even before he enlists the first time; when Bucky first gets the note that he’s been accepted into the army, Steve jokingly takes the small pieces of metal and cups them in his hand, cold and shiny against his pale skin. “See, Bucky, you’re a real soldier now,” he says, “you better not die before I get some of my own.”

“Don’t know if I want you there, really,” Bucky says in a low enough voice that Steve can pretend he hasn’t heard him.

“Yeah, you know what they say,” Steve continues, shaking his hand, closed around the metal tags, which are warming as his fingers tighten on them, “you can’t die if you’re wearing the wrong tags, so you better wait for me to get there, you hear me?”

Bucky reaches out and closes his hands over Steve’s, head bowed and a look of absolute misery on his face. It’s different to see, after his cavalier attitude surrounding the war; he’s wanted to go, to fight, to win, but this is so alien that it scares him.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, his fingers moving over Steve’s hands, tracing patterns on his knuckles, “yeah, I won’t let either of us die, you know, I don’t care what happens, but we’re gonna make it out alive.”

And Steve doesn’t know what to say, he never knows what to say, the words won’t obey him the same way they obey Bucky; it isn’t just that he’s scared, no, he wants to fight, but he doesn’t want to lose hie best friend. So instead of speaking he keeps his hands where they are, clenched so firmly around the tiny scraps of metal that it’s starting to hurt, and wishes as hard as he can that they’ll both be okay.

It’s only later, once he’s made it to the field and realised—it isn’t simple, it isn’t pretty, it’s blood and death and god damn it, this is _war_ —that Bucky first says you can’t die in battle if you’re wearing the wrong dog tags (“it’s just not _allowed_ , Stevie, you know that”), and it’s part-joke, part-superstition, part-something-else he can’t name.

Maybe it’s just the fact that he’s started to realise he can’t lose Bucky, he can’t, he’ll lose himself if that happens because Bucky is everything to him now, his friend, his brother, his home, and his self. He doesn’t tell anyone—how can he find words, he’s never been as good with words, they’ve never listened to him the same way he wishes they would—but sometimes, when they’re sitting together, relishing the fact that so far they’re both living, he tries to explain a part of it.

“You know,” Steve says, while they’re in the tent where he’s supposed to be staying (Bucky is supposed to be in another, with the other pieces of his division, but no one has the audacity to call either of them out on it) and he thinks he can try again, “I made it here, and I’m not dead yet.”

Bucky hesitates, bites his lips, clenches his fingers together. “I don’t want you to be here.”

Steve knows what he means, what he has to mean, but something about it still hurts. Bucky looks up swiftly and corrects himself, “Stevie, you know what I mean, I don’t want you to get hurt. I never wanted you to fight, you know that.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, because he _does_ know, he _does;_   “yeah, I know. I don’t want you to get hurt, either.”

“Besides,” Bucky adds, with a touch of his old humour, “you’ve got a girl now, Rogers, and we can’t ignore that. Think it’s an unnatural phenomenon,” (and that’s what he is, really, no matter how good it seems to be there, he’s still a freak) “that she likes you at all.”

“Oh, shut up,” Steve says, without feeling, and shoves Bucky with his shoulder. He’s taller now, and it still confuses him sometimes. Bucky grins and straightens his collar, his fingers hooking in the string tying the tags around his neck. “Hey, you still got those?”

They start trading their dog tags before missions, a silent promise to each other that they’ll both make it back in one piece; Steve doesn’t try to deny that there’s a certain thrill about wearing the wrong tags, something special—the name around his neck isn’t his, but he isn’t thinking about how he can’t die, he’s thinking about how Bucky has to stay alive—and after a while, after their divisions (because now, everyone’s accepted that there’s no parting them) keep fighting, eventually, eventually, they just stop trading back.

Something about carrying Bucky’s name against his skin makes Steve feel safer, braver. He isn’t afraid like he was before; it feels like Bucky’s always there with him, standing up for him the way he always does. A lifetime of being beaten up behind the stores and in the alleys, always with Bucky appearing to rescue him— _I thought you had him on the ropes_ —but this time Bucky isn’t there.

Steve doesn’t want to think about it, because he’s been hurt so many times already; it isn’t that he’s been wounded physically, only the deep ache of mental torment that keeps gnawing away at his insides. He drags himself to the field each day, forcing himself to survive, because no one, no one, could call what he’s going through living.

It feels unreal, at the time it happens: The train hasn’t derailed, but he doesn’t think that’s much better, if at all; it keeps moving away, slicing across the mountain, sending the snow sifting down in a white cloud around the wheels, and he can’t do anything but hold on and wish that none of it had ever happened.

They find him there when the train stops, miles after the original stopping point, curled against the icy railing and barely sheltered from the wind, cheek pressed to the cold metal, his fingers white and full of pain from how hard he’s been gripping the handle. They try to detach him, pull him away with enticements and promises, but he can’t move— _no, he refuses to move, refuses to believe_ —because if he moves from that spot, it’ll become real. He’ll admit that Bucky’s gone, gone, being left behind somewhere in the mountains, lost to him for the last time, and he’s being carried farther and farther away, and there’s nothing he can do.

He doesn’t speak about it, about how it really felt; he tells Peggy about the whole thing, the incident, as it’s formally related to the rest of them— _the words they use are too simple, too common to describe Bucky, to recreate his best friend_ —but he leaves out the irrevocably tenacious terror that he’s lost Bucky, one more time, and it’s the final losing that won’t be revoked.

It isn’t just that he’s lost a soldier, it’s the fact that he’s lost him again, again. _Is there not a set amount of times to lose the people you love more than life itself?_ he wonders when he’s trying as desperately as he can to drown himself with alcohol and other drugs or even the fighting. Nothing works, not consistently, and the convalescence he was reassured he would eventually obtain hasn’t yet appeared.

When Bucky falls he takes Steve’s name with him into the abyss instead of his own. Some part of him hopes, stupidly, foolishly, that something like that superstition will be enough to keep Bucky alive. He knows better. He’s gone, and there’s no bringing him back.

He goes through the days as if in a monotony, repeating the same routine over and over ad infinitum, until he’s in the ship with Schmidt and he’s thinking, _I have to do this_ , and what he doesn’t tell Peggy is that he doesn’t give her the coordinates because he doesn’t want to be found.

It’s like some part of him died in the mountains; Peggy even says it, the night when she finds him in his room, sobbing and disintegrating; she wraps her arms around him and promises it’s okay, he’s okay, _but it isn’t okay, because Bucky isn’t okay_.

“You act like something in you is dead,” Peggy whispers as she touches his face and his hair, letting him hold on to her like a drowning man, starved for touch and comfort; even she is not enough, but he can pretend otherwise for a while.

He can’t bring himself to tell her he’s acting like this not only because he feels like he’s died, but also because Bucky was a part of him, and if he’s gone, then Steve has nothing left to live for except for her.

Peggy understands, to an extent; he suspects she’s lost someone for her own part, but there’s no way to convey the agony of having his heart ripped from his chest in the winter on a frozen train, the mountains scaling to the sky all around him.

In his dreams it’s he who lets go instead of Bucky, and it’s a better world.

When the world collapses around him, white lines rush up to cover his vision, and he closes his eyes and holds on desperately to the controls as the roaring in his head washes over him. In the last moments before impact and the pressure of the water covers everything, he thinks of his family, and Peggy, and keeps thinking of Bucky as the world dissolves into blackness and quiet and finally it’s _over._

Steve still has Bucky’s name around his neck when they pull him out of the ice, and he keeps it the same way he keeps the picture of Peggy in his pocket, although then he’s sure he’ll never see either of them again.

Everything that comes next is a blur of confusion, and no one is there for him. Always, it seems, Bucky’s been by his side to help him stand and make his way through everything, but now he has no one. Steve doesn’t know what’s different, in the modern world, other than the fact that he doesn’t have Bucky. It’s what he focuses on, each day, when people try to tell him it’s okay.

Time moves slower in the new world, although the people complain it goes quicker; lights and action predate the cameras, although it seems the government has plenty of those at its disposal as well. Every little thing is a new lesson, and he hates it, he hates it, he hates it.

“’Til the end of the line,” Bucky mumbles, dropping his head against Steve’s chest, holding him like he’s a lifeline, and Steve doesn’t say what he’s thinking; maybe, after all this time, they finally have reached the end of the line and there’s nowhere left to go.

It’s almost like all those cliché promises they swore would be more than that— _until death do us part_ —only it won’t be death that claims either of them, only life, and when it happens it’ll be final.

But then, there’s always something new to fight for, even when he doesn’t want to fight. The tags he wears around his neck are remnants of the past, but he’s stuck in the present, with nowhere else to go.

“See?” Bucky says— _years later; after the ice, after the torture, after the ruin and the war_ —when he and Steve are relearning how to live and how to love, “what did I tell you, huh? My name around your neck . . . I’m not gonna let you die.”

“Yeah?” asks Steve, his palm pressed over the place where Bucky’s heart is beating, comforted by the fact that now, even after everything they’ve been through, they’re still alive, “and what about my name around yours?”

It’s still something he’s only barely dared to consider, refusing to call himself a superstitious person or to give in to myths, but he doesn’t want to admit that it’s what kept him going all those years. Call him old-fashioned (and people often do), but he’s always been looking for the world out of which he was taken, even now.

Bucky considers his words, touches the metal; his metal fingertips brush the dog tags, turning them over in his hand. “Your name,” he says slowly, his forehead pressed against Steve’s, eyes flickering up to meet his, voice low and meaningful, “your name will bring me back from the dead.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](spacestationtrustfund.tumblr.com).


End file.
